Author: Joki Rosdahl

The second SPHINX paper has now been accepted for publication!
Katz et al. (2020) describes how the process of reionization suppresses the accretion of gas filaments onto dwarf galaxies and hence quenches their growth.

Thanks to PRACE , we have received 54 million core-hours to perform the next SPHINX simulation on the JUWELS supercomputer at JSC. The SPHINX20 volume has a width of 20 co-moving Mpc, and is 8 times larger than our previous largest volume. This will give us a much better sample of galaxies to study the variations in the escape of ionizing radiation from galaxies, up to ten times higher galaxy masses than we could before.

SPHINX20 is now running and has reached redshift 11. Stay tuned!

The first project paper has been submitted for publication and posted on ArXiv. The paper is named “The SPHINX Cosmological Simulations of the First Billion Years: the Impact of Binary Stars on Reionisation“. Here, we present the setup and physics of our simulation suite and address the question of whether and how binary stars affect reionisation. It turns out that due to mass transfer and mergers between binary companion stars, the escape fraction of ionising radiation from galaxies is significantly higher than without binary stars, and this leads to early reionisation (redshift >6), while the Universe fails to reionise before redshift 6 with single stars only.

Welcome to the SPHINX project. We will use this site to post news about the project and simulation data.